It's Camelot!

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UH-OH, THE ACCREDITATION LETTER

GOOD LORD, what a long day! Taught a class at 9:30, then another at 12:30, then dashed off to the Academic Senate meeting at 2:00, which went until past 4:30.

I hung around campus (IVC) long enough to find out what kind of letter the Accreds had sent the college. Looks like we’re in for another “focused midterm report,” only this time without a “site visit.” That’s an upgrade from the last report card, although the Accreds still seem to think our board micromanages and that the college community continues to soak in Mathurian goo (aka, hostility and despair).

THE BIG ATEP MEETING

Eventually, I made my way to Saddleback College for the special SOCCCD board of trustees meeting concerning the “Advanced Technology and Education Park” (ATEP) in beauteous Tustin, along lovely Ant Hill Boulevard. Tonight was the night for presentations of the “partnership” proposals submitted for use of our 68 acres, which are located just three or four blimp-lengths from one of those big Marine helicopter hangers.


For some reason, the trustees were late—someone told me they were probably screaming at each other about the replacement of Donna Martin. But I dunno. I huge crowd awaited their arrival.

At about 6:40, the trustees made their way to their chairs. Then there was a long and weird silence. Nobody said a thing. Then somebody pushed a button, and off they went.

After some folderol, Chancellor RAGHU P. MATHUR introduced the ATEP business. He explained about the 13 proposals that had been submitted. For tonight, he said, only three of the groups who had submitted proposals would be making presentations. CSU Fullerton would present two of them, some outfit called the SEIS Group would present a third, and then Camelot Entertainment Group would present the fourth.

The idea seemed to be that these four are the top of the heap.


According to whom? Mathur made a point of explaining the process whereby the use of ATEP was being determined. According to Mathur, the “governance groups”—faculty, et al.—are a part of the decision-making process! (Don't think so.) The 13 proposals, he said, were duly assessed by the Chancellor’s Executive Committee—a group that included no reps from the governance groups. The Committee, he insisted, “not only invited input” from the governance groups, but “their input is expected!”

Well, that’s bullshit. We stared at him.

Mathur blathered a while the way he does. He talked about the need for nurses. He yammered about “culinary arts” and “hospitality arts.” I don’t know what he was talking about. Everybody just wanted him to shut up.

Eventually, he reminded us that, by 2009, we’ve got to demonstrate to the City of Tustin that we’ve got our act together, ATEPwise, or we’ve screwed the pooch bigtime.

Raghu didn’t put it that way, of course.

PARK RANGER BOB


Park Ranger Bob Kopecky then spoke. “Partnerships are a two-way street,” he said. It’s all about “embedded education,” he said. We’re talking big money, he said.

Then he sketched all 13 of the proposals. One has something to do with “rapid prototyping” and modern manufacturing techniques. Another involves building some kind of big educational thingamabob that will take up the whole 68 acres.

CSUF has two proposals. One concerns the biotech industry and state-of-the-art facilities. The other is a CSUF satellite, comprising upper division and graduate programs. Then came CAMELOT Entertainment, the 800 pound gorilla of the evening. Camelot hopes to spend $800 million on a studio complex with sound stages and back lots. Meanwhile, EBD wants to help out minority businesses. Entertainment Arts Consortium wants to retrofit existing facilities to do I-don’t-know-what. ICON wants to train 18-26 year-olds in needed skills. The SEIS Group—one of the night’s big presenters—is “robotics”-oriented.

The next proposal was way cool: SkyVenture wants to build the world’s largest vertical wind tunnel. It would be used for testing products or something. I think they’re gonna drop guys into it and blow ‘em around, too.

Some engineering firm hopes to do something with rapid prototyping. There was something about expensive software. An outfit named VOIT seems to specialize in master planning. So they’d pretty much take over this whole ATEP thing and do it for us, I guess. Not sure.

The last proposal was called “Young Americans.” They’re patriotic and cheerful or something, and they used to be on Ed Sullivan. They sound like total shit. I think they want ATEP for their world headquarters, where they’d train 200-250 young Republicans to dance and pray and warble. (See Young Americans.)

After the Bobster spoke, two “project consultants” yammered at us. They sounded pretty smart, but don’t ask me what they said. I liked their names: “Dante” and “Andreas.” Andreas (or was it Dante?) carried around an opera book. I checked it out. Hardcore, man.

THE BIG THREE

It’s getting pretty late, so I’ll cut to the chase. CSU Fullerton got up first. They wanted to “nourish” entrepreneurs, I think.


The SEIS Group was next. The Group seems to be these two young guys. They seemed too young to do anything real or serious. They used a Mac, though, so I liked ‘em. They went on and on about Robotics. Evidently, they want to train kids to use a machine that they seemed to think was pretty special, but I keep seeing that very machine on American Chopper—you know, the one Vinny uses to cut special iron parts. I think these SEIS guys need to watch the Discovery Channel more often.

Next came Camelot, and, man, they were slick. Plus they were determined to WIN THIS THING.

I’ll have more to report about this tomorrow, cuz, right now, I need to catch a few Zzzzz's. But, trust me, these Camelot guys are slick. At one point, they even called themselves "slick." And they dragged everybody that they could think of to this presentation. One guy flew out all the way from New York just to stand up and wave. Another guy said something about a letter of recommendation from Sheriff Mike Carona. So it could be that Camelot is mobbed up. Or maybe they're into Russian cuties.

Well, the Camelot people went on and on, and the board treated them like special cases. The meeting stretched into the night, with multiple time extensions. I kept watching administrators: they were sleeping and drooling and staring that thousand-yard stare.

More tomorrow. But I think things went well. I think Bob was pretty pleased.

We’ll see.